After checking out our hardware and software video tours of HTC’s ChaCha, are you getting excited to see the phone arrive in the US as the Status on AT&T? We’ve been pretty impressed with what HTC came up with, from a revamped Sense to fit the smartphone’s unusual screen resolution, to hardware that seems more than capable of keeping up with the demands of a social networking junkie.

The Status was announced at the end of last month, but we were left guessing as to when it would arrive. A recent rumor said that it would come out sometime this month, still not narrowing things down much. It turns out that the Status is nearly upon us, with pre-orders beginning today, and the smartphone set to arrive at AT&T stores on Sunday, July 17.

A Status on a standard two-year service agreement will set you back just about $50. That’s a pretty nice price for a brand-new smartphone, Facebook integration aside. Between emphasis on social networking and the low price, it looks like HTC and AT&T are strongly pushing the Status towards the youth market. Will it succeed where models like Microsoft’s Kin have failed? We’ll start finding out next week.